Fitt Insider, a media brand for the fitness and wellness industry, is a good example of the type of media brand that hits on many of the current trends in the industry:

• Niche. The fitness and broader wellness industry is a growing area that will only expand.
• B2B.  The most robust media models are B2B or targeting influential audiences with similar approaches.
• Direct. Fitt relies on podcasts for engagement and its 100,000 email subscriber list for audience data and a direct connection. 
• Organic. Too many newsletters are growth hacked. Fitt Insider has traded slower growth for a quality list that has open rates near 75%.
• Expertise. Fitt Insider’s founders, Anthony and Joe Venare, are fitness industry experts, having owned gyms and invested in the space.
• Media flywheel. The best media models tend to make most of their money in media-adjacent areas. For Fitt, this is through its recruiting and consulting arms.

Anthony Vennare joined me on The Rebooting Show to break down the Fitt Insider model, and how he views media more expansively. That’s led him to forgo the typical ads and marketing heavy approaches to monetization. 

Before I get to this week's episode, just a couple of quick reminders.

the rebooting's fourth anniversary is coming up in a week.

I can't believe it.

It seems like a long time, but it also seems like, I'm just getting started with this.

I suspect that's common for a lot of these endeavors, particularly in media, where everything takes longer and is, three times as hard as the cliche says.

I'm going to engage in a little, navel gazing, with a newsletter next week about the lessons learned and plans for the next phase of the rebooting.

one spoiler, I'm very glad I took this path, you know, even if sometimes it seems a lot harder than other journeys, because I, I can't imagine doing anything else.

and one way to support the rebooting is to upgrade to a TRB, Pro membership.

you can get full access to the rebooting.

All the rebooting content invites to member events, including preferred access to our dinner series.

Soon there will be a texting community.

I'm interested to try that out.

We're going to keep adding to this membership.

I've set up a 20 percent discount for podcast listeners.

Now, I am not into regular discounting because I just look at what it did to Gap, where everything's always 50 percent off.

But I want to try one of these around the anniversary, it's usually a good idea.

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Go to the rebooting.

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If you're already getting the newsletter and I hope you are, sign in and you can upgrade from there, use the code podcast, in all caps and 20 percent will be applied checkout.

The regular cost of a TRB pro membership is 200.

So you can get it for 150 or as many publishers say, it's less than 3 a week.

Think about that.

That is, That's basically a quarter cup of coffee in New York City.

So hope you will consider that one other thing to check out.

We recently wrapped up a research study about the state of sustainable news businesses.

I was frankly, a little surprised at the results.

They were, they were more optimistic, honestly, than I was thinking over half of our respondents, said that they were profitable and, you know, large majority said they expected expanded profitability in 2025.

Now, this could be just the nature of the respondents.

You know, we knocked out those who did not produce journalistic content as their main business lines.

it, it could also be a sign that a lot of the cost cutting and slimming down that we've seen.

This year and honestly, you know, going back here is really getting these publications a little bit fitter.

there's no doubt that news is still pretty challenged business.

but Do hope that this is something of a counterpoint to many of the doom and gloom narratives out there, because while a lot of businesses are in difficult positions, there are other upstarts that are in, you know, in healthy shape.

And, I think sometimes we have to be able to keep those two things in mind.

Anyway, check out the research for yourself.

Let me know what you think.

You can find it on the Rebootings homepage.

Thank you to Outbrain for supporting this research.

They're great partners and I really greatly appreciate it.

So this week, I am talking to Anthony Vennare.

He is the co founder of Fitt Insider, which if you don't know Fit Insider, it is it's one of my favorite, You know, niche media companies.

and it's sitting at the intersection and I love intersections of, a booming industry, which is fitness, and business.

And, this is always a good approach.

One of the things that I like about Fit Insider is that it touches on a bunch of things, that I believe about.

You know, where we are with building these sustainable media businesses for one.

It's niche.

fit insider is, is just zeroed in on the fitness industry.

And, you know, that's what it lives and breathes.

The other one is, as I said, it's B to B.

and this could be.

My bias from my background, but the most robust media models that I see they tend to be in B2B or at least in reaching influentials and using B2B like models.

the other thing I like about Fit Insider is it comes from the point of view of a practitioner.

Anthony and his brother, Joe, who is a co founder too, have spent their careers in the fitness industry, they've been gym owners, investors, and this is just qualitatively different.

Then the role of the observer that the reporter or journalist typically is.

It's not an all or nothing thing.

I think too often these two different approaches and what I call the information space are pitted against each other.

And to me, they're complimentary.

Right?

you know, you can do the play by play, and you can do the color commentary.

and really, you know, Fit Insider, and we talk about this, you know, it's about the connecting of the dots.

And I think that is a very robust area of journalism still.

and the other one is that Fit Insider uses media, and this is critical, as the front end to a bunch of other better businesses, and uses the content, to act as a flywheel.

So I think that is something that we're seeing in a lot of areas and sometimes it doesn't go so well with content and commerce models.

But Fit Insider has a really interesting approach to this.

It started as a simple text group among industry friends.

You know, Joe and Anthony were sharing just, Their views on the fitness and wellness industries, it evolved into an email newsletter during covid.

What, what, what else?

and now it's, it's really on its way to becoming a comprehensive media platform and even expanding into a B to C, couple of the key takeaways that I had from this one is the power of organic growth, because, they didn't go down the regular newsletter, route of, You know, pumping it up with a lot of, you know, recommendations or aggressive marketing.

one of my pet peeves about the newsletter world is that, you know, there's a lot of arbitrage in it.

And, you know, I think it's a path it's, it's harder to pull off in my view, long term.

but in the short term, you know, yeah, I guess you have a sugar high, but I think you can see this with Fit Insider's numbers, you know, open rates.

Yeah, we all know that they have their flaws, but, you know, Anthony's talking about 68 to 75 percent open rates.

That's directionally, indicates that they've got a good tie to their audience.

and the other one is, is, you know, they've really taken an unconventional approach to monetization.

You know, they haven't done the common B2B media tactics like webinars, Guilty.

Branded content, guilty still.

or dedicated sponsor emails on this, I'm not guilty.

and instead what Anthony and Joe are doing is, you know, leveraging that audience trust that you get through content, right?

In order for other business expansion.

So for instance, Fit Insider has a successful recruiting firm.

It offers consulting services for in depth market research and analysis.

And it's also, investing in businesses.

So I think this is a really good approach if, if you have, you know, the right background for it.

And just in our conversation, I can tell, You know, Anthony does.

He's a serial entrepreneur in this space.

and, you know, I think it comes through in our conversation that he has a very clear vision of what fit insider can be.

And it's not quote unquote, just a media brand at all so hope you enjoy this conversation.

Anthony shared some great, details about, Fit Insider's, unique approach and, I really enjoyed it.

So I hope you will too, as always, would love your feedback.

you can do that a couple of ways.

One is just sending me an email.

My email is bmorrissey@therebooting.Com.

It's all over all the newsletters.

I think usually, or you can just reply to one of those.

also leave a, leave a rating interview for the show.

wherever you get it, I always like to see them and, you know, I think it helps grow the show.

I'm still, I still don't know anything about podcast, growth.

So if anyone, anyone has any tips on that, I mean, this is growing fine, but I really don't understand, how the mechanics of, of growing podcasts, even after doing them for so many years.

Anyway, here's my conversation with Anthony.

awesome, Anthony.

thank you so much for, for joining me today, the Rebooting show.

Yeah.

Excited chat.

Okay.

So give us the, give us the background on Fit Insider.

This is, this is a pandemic baby.

So, first, I mean your background, you know, you were.

You were in the sort of fitness industry, right?

You, is that correct?

And you were also like an investor, but give, give us the background and then how you ended up like with a media business that is now becoming more than a media business, but give us the background.

Yeah.

we've my brother and I own it together.

We've owned everything together.

and we kind of have pretty much done anything you could do in the health and wellness space, owning gyms, producing equipment, education, fitness products, technology.

we have done so many things and I think that's also why we have a unique.

Approach to media is because we've actually been in the space that we talk about our entire careers, but every company we've ever run There was always a media component.

It was very early on It was like Thrillist days Gary Vee's books were coming out and it was like this content commerce model we always bought into content commerce and This was super super early on and you know 2010s 2012, 13.

Well, even when we were running our gyms, localized before there was any real social media and anything, especially where we started in Pittsburgh, it was always content commerce.

So we went that route.

And then after our last company, we were sitting around during COVID and it was no one talks about, it started pre COVID actually as a random.

Just text group where we were going through some deals, Joe and I were working on an investment and trying to sell our company.

And a few people in the industry were like, Oh, did you see this happened?

Or this company is going to raise.

And it was when fitness and wellness and health wasn't nearly what it is today, even though it was only five years ago.

And there wasn't that much investment dollars and there wasn't that much going on in a few people were talking about things.

And then it went from like 20 people in a text group to, I started sending it out as a Gmail, where I would just BCC people.

Okay,

then COVID happens and then it's a BCC of like 250 people.

And then you started having to split it up because you could only email so many people at a time as we got into the hundreds.

And every week people are like, Oh, put me on this list, put me on this list, or like email me this thing.

but let me ask you this, so you started with a core of people who are in the industry, right?

it was friends that I would just, cause I love the news side and I would just be like, Hey, this company raised, this company did this.

And it was me always just sending info to them.

Like, Hey, I think this is going to happen.

What do you think about this?

Yeah.

And, and were you attracting the kinds of people?

Or were you able to tell if you were attracting the kinds of people that?

You know, made it be like, Hmm, there's something here that is you know, that it's one thing if like, you know, random people are, are, are getting on the list, but it's another thing if, if those people are, you know, in the target segment, I don't know if you had a target segment at the time, but people

Well, that's what it was.

It was, we didn't know at first, but it was just who we, who we worked with because of our work in the industry.

It was founders, execs in, in the market.

And that's where like the Gmail came around and as that started to grow.

And then I think it was, you know, I'd say a couple months after COVID hit where, you know, Joe and I looked up and we're like, we have 5, 000 people reading this email that we send out.

And it's all industry people.

We've never promoted it or talked about it.

There's not even a way to sign up.

You had to like ask to sign up for it.

And we were like, okay, we don't really know what we're doing, but.

And it's a kind of a crazy time at the same time.

I had been diagnosed with a brain tumor.

So like I was out health wise, not really working.

Joe was doing his thing and we were just like, okay, well, we're doing this.

And it's kept me busy, kept him busy with everything going on.

It was kind of fun.

And we're like, we don't know what this is going to be, but when the CEOs of all the companies that are doing big things are reading something you're writing, you're like, this is at least worth it.

pursuing because it was just a once a week email.

yeah.

So let's talk about the, the.

Industry, right?

Because like, I wonder about the fitness industry, right?

Because if you're in a gym, are you in the fitness industry?

Are you like, you're in gym owners?

Like, I don't know, do how did the parts because I think about like, skiffed, right?

Whereas I remember when when was starting, I was like, I don't know if there's like a travel industry.

I mean, airlines are in the airline industry, they don't consider themselves in the same thing.

Transcribed Industry.

I mean, they are in like some kind of research report or something, but day to day, what is the sort of overlap?

Or is this like a series?

Or is this a bunch of different industries that sort of overlap but don't quite overlap?

That's why we took off.

So the problem with our industry fitness, and I should have never called it fit, cause it's well beyond fitness.

Fitness is such a small sector of what we do, but, the fitness industry, especially if you look at, which we didn't know we were doing the template, the B2B media side, it's been the same companies or copycats of those companies that do right about the same nonsense.

pay to play, branded content, just bad media all around.

Bunch of ads on the site, just not done well ever.

and I think that's why we took off because it was, it was yes, fit and fitness, but it was health, wellness, active lifestyle, recreation, nutrition, and this Broad anything that butts up against like payer provider health care all the way through fitness and wellness and health.

And if you look at that market, it's insanely mass, the wellness market, the global wellness side of trillions and trillions of dollars.

Yes.

A gym owner is somebody that reads us, but it's also the person that owns 150, you know, orange theory franchises.

It's also the person that works at innovation at Kaiser Permanente.

It's also the, you know, it's, it's so broad.

Especially now.

And that's, we were just good timing as well with the wave of COVID where fitness and wellness and health and healthcare was just at the forefront of everything.

Everyone's attention, working out at home, Peloton, all that stuff.

And we were the only ones that had a perspective on it outside of some of these older brands that, like I said, were just publishing press releases for people and rewriting things.

So it just went from thousands and thousands of people every month and just kept growing organically.

Okay, so the white space you saw was that one, and this is in a lot of B2B areas, like the white space starts sort of with the incumbents like sock, like they just have a terrible experience.

And like there's a whole bunch of different reasons but that it's a nearly like abusive relationship with the audience.

very surface oriented, a lot of regurgitation of press releases, and it doesn't even seem like they're trying a lot of times.

but then also, it seems like what you're saying is there wasn't anyone taking a more of a holistic view of, of this space, right?

is that accurate?

It was holistic and connecting the dots between it all, which it is now.

And now it's common, it's common sense and knowledge of what that is.

And that's what everybody says.

And then more importantly, it was not us writing news.

It was, what does it mean?

Why does it matter?

What's our take on it?

And as operators and builders in the space here that I actually think this means.

And it's not saying, Oh, Peloton's worth billions of dollars.

It's us being like, Peloton just did this.

Here's what I think it means.

What does it mean for you?

Here's all the other investments that are going on.

What should you be building?

Connecting, you know, our input and our thoughts and our experience and strategy, as well as news and information into, you can call it like creator stuff or however you want to look at it.

But it was just, it was me.

And the newsletter comes from my email and me.

And it's not like, Hey, we're.

a media company.

It's like, here's what I think is happening and here's what's going on.

Here's what you should know about it.

Yeah.

And that is tremendous, you know, leverage, right?

Because you have, you and your brother both have, you know, operator experience and investor experience that gives you, and this is something we see across lots of different areas that gives you a different perspective and honestly, credibility that, you know, a journalist doesn't have at the end of the day, right?

If there, if it was someone who was.

aggregating content about the fitness industry, that's not going to have the same cut through as someone who's been in it.

Totally.

And it's not only our experience compared to the journalists, but it's also, we weren't monetizing their eyeballs and their attention in what they were giving us in any way.

Our model was different.

So not only was our approach different in terms of what we were covering and why and our input, but then it was, I'm not trying to get you to read this.

If you're going to read it, it's going to be valuable and people will share and read and engage.

But if you read or don't read, it doesn't bother me at all.

And we were only, it was like, can we build the best possible content?

If I was a founder, I've been a founder in this space my whole life.

What would I want to know about?

What would I want to read?

And that's the lens we look at for today too.

And that's why people I mean, we have like a feedback page on the site, like hundreds and hundreds of people talking about the brand and what we cover and what we do and the relationships we have.

It's because it's always the value and I'm never going to monetize our connection to them through garbage.

Yeah.

When did you just, when did you decide that, when did you both decide, let's make this like a real business?

Yeah, honestly, not even until last year.

Really?

we didn't monetize it at all until we put our first

This is, this is a very unusual approach.

Yeah, years, years, three, two and a half

you're doing a shit ton of stuff

Yeah, now we are, now we are, but like, yeah, it was, so we're lucky that we've, built and sold some companies, built some big brands, done a lot of projects.

And that when we were doing this, it was very much, it was purely for the love of the game and the value and the relationships.

And because it was Joe and I's name in our, in our brand every day, every week, when tens of thousands of people leading the space and investing in building in the space would trust us, we built that trust over time and we didn't have to monetize.

So we were just doing it and it re it was a lot of stuff, but in reality, you know, once a week newsletter, once a week podcast built the jobs board, but it's.

It's free.

We built these other platforms where they were free and valuable for the audience and hired a few writers and kind of built some things, but it was, it was, end of 2022, early 2023.

And we're like, oh, this is a business.

Here's what we want to do.

But again, we didn't want to be ads.

You know, it just, we didn't want to go typical model.

So we started working on a different approach and building things around it and building this kind of flywheel that's centered around the media.

And that's when, as soon as we did that, it hit and we're like, Oh, this is insane.

Yeah.

What's really interesting that I find, because I talk with a lot of people whose, whose backgrounds are in, in media, you know, like I've been in media my whole life, right?

But then I talk with people like you, whose backgrounds are, are totally different, right?

And I think one of the refreshing things is, You didn't have like a media playbook that you were just going to run, right?

Like if you had been like steeped in I don't know, B2B media, let me tell you, you'd be doing a lot more webinars and you'd be doing a lot more sponsored content, you'd be, you know, you'd have a lot more ads and all that.

but tell me about how you ended up thinking, because you didn't have that go to playbook to fall back on.

Right.

but what did you take, say from like your, your other businesses that informed.

The model that you guys are building now.

It's all, we've always run businesses that revolve around content and just never media perspective.

And it was really what we saw was we have the trust and attention of these people.

To extract the monetary value from that relationship, it would have to be a webinar every day and add every, like it was just, and then it's always a race to the bottom of devaluing the product if you do it that way.

And you see it across all platforms.

Every time you look on one of these sites, there's more Google ads, there's more sponsorships, there's more events they're doing that are pay to play or the sole purpose of running ads.

And that just wasn't our game.

And it just didn't seem interesting to us.

Like we know we're leaving money on the table, even to this day for a lot of stuff, but it was.

If you look at our market, in reality, the wellness and health and fitness market is behind from an investment perspective, from a talent perspective, from research and data and information, it all changed very drastically.

So we said, okay, how do we build those pillars?

around this market.

Instead of, we knew the media playbook when we went and talked and engaged with the media world.

And I would rather do anything else than run a webinar in my entire life.

So it was

I run a few.

They're not bad.

Once you get in, once you get used to them, we call them online forums here at three.

And I just, I tried it.

So my, my approach is very different in that, in that I try to take the things that people are used to buying and doing and finding value in.

And rather than trying to create something totally new to basically say, we're basically going to do what you're comfortable with, but.

Do it like do it better and in a way that the value exchange is higher between the audience and you know what you get you're going to get more hopefully the audience is also going to get get more value and I mean, my hope is that the rebooting gets, also gets some more value too.

but you know, I think that there's an advantage to doing, to doing it totally differently.

So explain, explain to me how the flywheel works.

yeah, it was, it goes back to the content is created in with the value of the founders and the builders and operators in mind.

What do they need to hear, see?

And then at the same instance, it was, well, what else do they need help with?

Hiring, data, access information, relationships and connections.

So it was like, how do we build those?

So it started with the jobs board.

And obviously we do monetize our content.

We have the typical newsletter sponsorships, typical podcast sponsorships.

We do other things like that, but we do it in a very high cost, high level way that is built to deliver value and lets us focus on few partnerships at a high level.

And then outside of that, it's, we have hiring.

One of the biggest areas for a lot of companies that are growing it's it's The problem is hiring.

And, you know, a lot of people launch traditional jobs boards where you pay to post a job.

And that's the model ours was the jobs board is free and everyone can post and there's thousands of jobs, which now draws in almost a hundred thousand job seekers every month.

And then on top of that, we built a recruiting firm, an actual full service job.

talent and recruiting firm in that network.

Because we're talking to these people, we now help place them.

So we have the jobs board.

You can post things and pay to post things there.

But then on top of that, there's the recruiting.

So we have, you know, a very successful recruiting firm that sits on top of our job board and our candidate network and our platform that is that we built.

And it was just a different model.

And in my mind, it let us monetize it in a more specific and consistent in high growth way that the max out of where we could take that, that firm that sits on top of our platform fit talent is instantly much higher than I could ever see any jobs board getting.

And then us going from there.

So it's so funny you mentioned that because job sports have frustrated me for my entire career because they're like one of those things that everyone brings up and puts on a whiteboard.

And.

they never make as much money as The Trouble that they are.

They just don't.

you're going up against LinkedIn, you're going against, and it's just, it's really just difficult to make work.

And at my last place, I, I saw all these people were coming to our events and getting jobs.

I mean, they were going to get, get jobs.

And this hire, I was like, we need a recruiting firm.

We need to do executive recruiting.

Forget this jobs board stuff.

Let's what a recruiters get like 15%, 20 percent of the first year.

Depends 15 to 25, depending on the role and how you structure it.

And

that I like those, I like those numbers better than 200 bucks for job posts.

I got to say, here's the problem.

We had like a, a more traditional, media playbook we were running and it started to conflict.

With would our sponsors or want, you know, their people being poached would like, it started to conflict with the media playbook model.

So it sort of didn't make sense.

Cause he ended up protecting your, your core business.

Which is why.

our media exists almost like a non profit where it's the value, it's the product, you protect the product and our group has a wall around it that makes our media and that's all.

It's never for anyone other than, yes, we have sponsors, but it has no impact and we don't take any We don't engage with them in a way.

It's like, if you're going to buy a title sponsor spot on the newsletter podcast, this is what it is and how it is.

It's not like we're selling them relationships and these stacking these packages and, you know, customer engagement and everything.

Buy it or don't buy it.

Someone's going to buy it.

We're sold out.

through half of all of our inventory for half of next year sold out on all of our ad spots already.

So,

I got to try this model.

I do, I do totally different.

so,

This is not my experience at all.

Yeah.

and it's, I think it really lends itself to the value and the trust that we have.

And then the services we provide, it's because we know the space, like the recruiting or like consulting is another division of what we do.

And investing is the other one with the consulting division.

A lot of people put out reports, industry reports, and they're branded and co branded and behind paywalls and they're downloadable forms.

There's companies in our industry that do this in the scammiest way possible, where they put out a report, which honestly, half the time is stealing our content or other content that's written, put it in a thing, put it behind a email form.

And then that

email goes to Every sponsor on there.

It's but it's done in such a bad way where they don't know they're getting lead gen and they don't know what they're getting.

It's hidden.

It's always hidden.

And so for us, we don't do that.

We don't put out reports.

We will eventually they'll be free for everybody because it's about the content and there'll be no lead gen involved at all.

But What we do is the companies in our industry that need a deeper dive data, whether it be a fund or a company or a firm or an investor or startup, when they actually need true data and research and information and first party data, they come as a consulting project and hire us to do that very in depth.

report with actual information that is truly valuable in a high ticket way.

So it's like having one client for us in that way is like having a report, you know, hundreds of sponsors on a report or a data membership with thousands of paying customers a year, just with one partner.

Yeah.

I mean, it's, it's funny cause you have to, you have to optimize to something.

You sort of have to pick a lane to some degree.

Right.

And to me, it's like really, it's fascinating.

It's admirable.

The sort of like lane you're taking is, you know, this really deep business insights and, you know, trying to solve for a lot of problems within the organization, beyond Beyond just, you know, servicing, you know, basically being a sales enablement engine, because I think a lot of B2B.

It works and I'm guilty.

I'm not guilty of this.

I'm, I'm proud of it, but you know, it basically works as sitting between a buy and a sell side and, and brokering between the two of them.

Now, I don't know, maybe the fitness industry doesn't have those dynamics.

Cause like I was just talking with, I just did last week's podcast was with, Adam White from front office sports.

And you know, I've, I've been talking with Adam, you know, since really the beginning of a front office and.

You know, I was always being like, Oh, you should go into B2B.

Cause I, you know, I had my own playbook.

Right.

I was like, you should do all the B2B stuff.

And he's just like, yeah, there's not the same buy and a sell side that you have in say, you know, the media and marketing industry.

So he's it doesn't really even necessarily make sense for, for me, because you know, there's only whatever, 32 teams in the league and all of that, did that influence that?

Or did you just was your, was this just more of like a conviction?

I know that, I mean, that's, it exists, there's, there's buy and sell events, there's, it's all the same that you would think for anything else that industry really has, especially think fitness equipment alone, just gyms and fitness equipment, that connecting piece is worth millions and millions of dollars.

So, it's just something that we personally didn't want to do in the conviction around long term sustainable business that can't be devalued over time.

But these are, but these are also both services businesses that you're building.

you know, I mean, so that is.

It's a factor.

Obviously, obviously you're an investor and you know that a lot of, a lot of media companies, and I think that's inevitable, are going to be front ends to other businesses.

And look, it's great if you're a front end to a to a SAS software business.

Yeah, I'd love to have a SAS business.

I'd love to have 90 percent margins.

And that'd be wonderful.

But the reality is, I don't think many of those are going to work.

And so a lot of them end up Being services businesses.

you know, for instance, my last company, it was, it was, it was an events company with, with a publishing arm.

Right.

and, you know, events have slightly different dynamics.

What I see a lot of times is, you know, people have different flavors of services businesses.

Now this kind of services business has way better dynamics than like a content marketing services business.

That's for sure.

And I mean, events are part of what we have planned in the future.

And so are that style businesses.

So that's where the investment arm comes in.

And that's where us being in the position to invest, acquire, and partner with companies in a big way and have actual long term ownership.

But again, it all, it all centers around protecting the content in the audience.

We'll never jeopardize that, but everything we do around that as a business in this almost holding company model, where we do multiple things and own a number, I mean, we just launched a B2C company.

We just launched a

B2C media brand called

Wellworthy

Yeah.

all of the advertisers and partners that would be involved in that from that audience who need to reach them are already partners and people that follow and engage with us.

So it only made sense to do something like that because it made the business that much easier and scalable over time.

And with the team that we have in place, when it comes to content and hiring and consulting and others, those people all work for us.

We have that, that team.

So for us to be able to stand these projects up, it makes sense.

And I think.

What you said about, you know, being the front end of a lot of companies.

I see that.

And a lot of times the media either monetizes enough with a decent audience.

So you scale and then try to sell for a, you know, whatever multiple you, whether you think it's good or bad, they sell for that multiple and they go and sit somewhere and it's a quick transaction or Over time, they just scramble to get eyeballs and do this thing and launch multiple things.

And for us, it was, we weren't, we're taking a very long term approach to this.

And if we could own the infrastructure play for an industry with talent and media and investing and consulting and events and other things, what other things can we put on that infrastructure that we own that are valuable for that audience?

And we never want to sell them something that's not truly valuable.

Yeah.

And I think, I think one of the core decisions a lot of these kinds of, of, niche businesses, media businesses need to make, it's it's kind of a basic one.

It's like, are you going to go, are you going to go deeper or broader, right?

Are you going to try to, you know, go the industry dive route or you try to have, you know, go fit inside or whatever, keep going into different areas, right?

And that is a very media operator play.

and a lot of people want to do it.

And it, it can work, right?

Like you, once you have a playbook in any business, you're going to want to use that playbook in, in other sort of sectors probably.

yeah, but like, I guess you can try to do both.

Right.

or do you want to go deeper?

Do you want to provide more services to your existing, that fits within your existing vertical?

Right.

Yeah.

Well, so in the end, but we acquired a company called well to do out of Europe, UK,

Now there's geographic too.

That's a different way of like scaling.

And we're looking at acquiring other newsletters.

So the good thing about our sector is health and wellness broadly is so much, we could do a newsletter about each individual category.

Honestly, we're, we're struggling with, do we launch a second or third one?

Because there's just so much information, especially now that we acquired the international brand and rolled it under the fit insider thing.

And we have to, just an investment section on international and us base alone takes up half the newsletter nowadays.

So, yeah.

Scaling the production scaling the categories going niche in some areas.

it's a massive And we want to do all of that with that playbook and, and do more.

And we take a ton from industry dive.

They've done a lot.

We built a press release platform because we don't do any branded content because we don't do anything.

We built a press release platform that I think is, is, I mean, it's done super, super well for us from a business perspective.

events is something we're doing a lot of.

We started with smaller events and we're scaling from there.

As I mentioned, the B2C media is really just taking our playbook and reversing and saying, we have these people that are all, that would be partners.

Let's, let's work with them and sell them through to Wellworthy.

so we're doing that and always keeping our eye open and what can we learn from all of these different places that are doing media in their way.

But for us, it was, it was always, we don't want the end product to be the actual media itself.

Yeah.

How big is your team?

Full time, across everything, 10.

I mean, you guys do a lot of stuff.

How do you decide what's like, what's too much?

Because I mean, you're running a recruiting agency.

You're running like an investment firm.

You, you're, you're doing events.

You've got a consumer play.

what am I missing?

The consulting arm.

And then you get, oh, then you have a media business too, by the way.

a bunch of other stuff we haven't

And a bunch of other stuff we haven't gotten

to

yeah.

The good thing about us taking the time and building the flywheel,

I feel very lazy right now, Anthony.

no, I'm lucky that I have a kid.

I have a team of superstars that all worked for us, but also we did, we've built previous companies where we had hundreds of employees and all that.

This model was hire absolute killers that can run entire divisions and crush it on their own.

Use a lot of contractors, our podcast editing, our social, anything we're doing is, is agencies.

in contractors.

So that's why our full time team is small, but also it's the flywheel.

It was orchestrated so that, you know, every client we have, and we have a pretty great list on the talent side alone, which is only a handful of months old.

There was, there's no sales process.

There's no account maintenance.

There's no climate.

So there are people we engage with and work with and They know us and they trust us and we have this in the recruiting model for us.

We have a tens of thousands of people that opted into a candidate database.

We have our newsletter audience that is data enriched.

Do we know who's there?

We have my LinkedIn audience, which is 50, 000 plus people in deep connections.

We have a database of people that we know are killers that we can go to and recruit to and our brand carry.

So when we try to hire somebody, they respond to us very fast.

So we're able to do it in a better way.

Same thing with consulting, same thing with investing our, our flywheel of discovering companies, it's, we, we find a topic, we write about a topic and we cover companies that we see and companies that are in that category that we didn't cover, reach out people that want to build in that category, reach out people that want to operate within this.

So it all plays off and eliminates a lot of waste and is a true flywheel through the way that we've orchestrated it.

So that there's just less people needed and we rely on a ton of contractors and agencies.

Yeah, I mean, that's what I always, it's like the audience databases is everything in these businesses to me, I was trying to say this, like CRM is the new CMS, I don't know, I was trying to have some sort of corny, saying, but I just see in the business, like, you have to cut the job of content is to build loyalty.

And then you have to get the information to be able to segment the, your audience into these, these high value buckets that you then, then your job is to activate it.

Look, if you have a lead generation content marketing, arm, um, Right.

It's to activate it on behalf of your sponsors to, to generate leads.

It's either the sort of what I call CRM level leads of doing downloads and all the rest of the stuff, or it's in person getting the right people in a room, you know, that, that's, that's what you're, you're end up doing, but it seems what you're end up doing is sort of taking a similar approach, but you're, you're standing up these different business lines where the content.

Is almost leads for your, your own businesses.

Yes, it's that.

It's like when you see a lot of prime examples, newsletters where people get dedicated sentence, obviously everyone's familiar with that

yeah,

I would never, ever in a million years, you would have to pay me a

partner, I got, I got an email about a partner email the other day and I was just like, you know, it's really hard to turn, maybe it's just me.

I don't like to turn, I gotta be honest.

Is it this, and I'm like, I just hit send and I'm like, I totally get, I totally get that decision because I'm like, I think of the, you know, making money is, you know, you gotta work for it.

I hate to tell people out there, and I'm like.

This is really not much work.

But I, yeah, I

crazy.

It's easy work.

I get why people do it.

And then I also get why people buy email lists and grow their thing and then get to this red level.

But it, it just, for me, that audience that we have.

We've never tried to grow the fit audience.

It's grown organically to where it's at and that audience to send them an email that would have, when they, when email comes from my personal email address, it comes from me.

And then the way that it goes

There's so much leverage in that, but then there's so much it's like, ah, damn, it's under my name.

I can't do this.

it's crazy.

But in the end, like they're getting email from me.

I would never email someone else, email them about something else, someone else, because then when I email them about something truly, that is involved in the business, the value and the interaction and the trust that we have, it's just our approach.

And I don't.

put anyone down for doing it, but just how Joe and I approach the industry.

Like, I would never take that.

And it's because the bigger we see as the bigger opportunity.

And it's, it's why we don't even consider ourselves through media as much as it is.

We are trying to truly elevate the industry, build things, create things, help companies creating it and be perceived as the individuals driving this forward versus the ads and the other stuff that are doing it.

Just like the creators do, but the creators are always consumer facing.

Right, but I mean you're sort of flipping what you did before on its head, right?

I mean you talked about content and commerce and I was gonna like jump in because it was like more commerce and Content because to me I'm I'm more of a believer of commerce and content than content and commerce Meaning like if you have a relationship with someone as a content provider all of a sudden, you know, selling them a product I think is, is a leap in a lot of cases.

but as a commerce company, right, you can use content to create tremendous leverage, you know, negative CAC or whatever you want to call it.

But I.

You know, I think what you're doing now, it seems like it's you started with aggregating this audience and then, and then standing up the various services around, around audience that you're, you're, you end up getting, you know, all their data and stuff like this to, to be able to power those other businesses.

That's it.

And for us too, I keep going back to it.

It sounds kind of cheesy, but I look, if we, as long as you protect that person and that audience and that value of content, like no matter how, if someone's a million dollar a year client on talent, I'd never jeopardize the The broader audience and do anything we never, the areas never touch.

And I think that's also super critical because then eventually everything becomes an arm of one or the other where one's promoting one or the other.

But for us, the media is always the value that the audience and content.

And if we deliver them true value, and then I can personally build those relationships.

It's exhausting.

Like I'm on calls all day, every day.

I'm in, I'm traveling all the time.

I'm meeting people and hanging out and we're always doing it.

We always say we never have an ask.

There is never an ask of like, we want something for you, whatever.

If you want to sponsor, cool, come to us.

If you want to be a client, cool, come to us.

Being that like cool person that can vat all this value and do all this stuff for free.

It's exhausting and it takes a long time and you have to be in the position that we were to be able to take that timeline.

But in the end, it worked out luckily for us.

But it's not like we, we didn't come up with some crazy business model.

We just didn't make money for a long time and built a brand for a long time.

That's it.

Yeah.

Well, the best salespeople are not like sellers.

so let's talk numbers a little bit.

Like how big is the, how big is the newsletter?

We are just, oh, just about 100, 000 subscribers right now.

Okay.

And what's the breakdown of the, the, like, how do you bucket out your revenue?

Do you do it between like media revenue and then the different, you know, consulting, recruiting and like, how do you break out the revenue when you look at the business?

Yeah.

The, it all exists.

We don't do separate entities.

It's all under one holdco and everyone just has their own separate P& L.

So,

Oh, there's separate PNLs.

Interesting.

but it's, it's done under one company technically.

I mean, media is 5 percent of our business.

Interesting.

It's interesting

because like, how, cause my follow up is like a good book.

Go on, give me the other like

the media is 5%.

And I think, yeah, we'll probably, we're probably over 100, 000 subscribers now, but we clean the list.

We get rid of people.

We don't promote it in which I know open rate, whether you believe it or not as valuable, but our range is 68 to 75%, from what we can track.

So it's like super engaged.

The people are there.

The, the opens per person is insanely high.

The response rate, the trust there, the podcast is, is big.

It's a, it's a big audience there.

And.

We also have, we, it's not about, the goal is to get them onto our subscriber list, but like my LinkedIn is, is, has a massive reach and engagement.

And more people now tell me they're reading my stuff on LinkedIn than they are even in commenting on the podcast or newsletter.

And it kind of goes through waves, but, the, the, the only way we monetize the media is we have a title sponsor in every newsletter and a title sponsor in every podcast.

And then we have press release platform.

That's it.

So it's, it's, there's not that many and you could charge a lot for them and we do, but there's only, there's a very limited inventory and

they

create scarcity, right?

I mean, the, the biggest, the biggest problem of media when it met the internet was it lost scarcity and, we all experienced the end result of that when we go on a webpage, because there's limited cost of putting an extra ad unit on a webpage.

There's limited cost of firing off another autoplay video on a webpage.

There's frankly, no cost when someone asked me to send that page.

Quote, unquote, partner email.

I was like,

Oh, this is straight to the bottom line.

I like those margins, but you know, you have to protect, you got to protect the asset.

what, but what is the biggest is, is consulting the biggest or is, or

It's tied.

It's a, it's a three way tie between consulting, recruiting, and we, we don't talk about them and we won't say the names, but other own companies that we operate, other own products that we own that we sell to this audience broadly.

And then

I'd

you have a lot going

the investing side is pretty good.

There's, you know,

Yeah, but that's hard to, it's, that's hard to like, understand.

I don't know.

I mean, that's hard to know if it's, I wonder how that's going to go.

Cause you know, there was a moment during the pandemic, when it was like a trendy newsletter operator kind of thing.

You know, I, I started, I was like, we're doing a rolling fund.

Like sort of like and I don't know, I'm a little older.

So I was just like,

No, we didn't do that.

We did a traditional fund.

There's fees, there's value there, but also it's what we, we've dedicated a lot of that money towards.

We call it almost like a co founder studio.

We're creating products like Wellworthy is a prime example.

We're creating products and companies that we can promote that are valuable to our audience and to other people.

there, there's no real conflict involved in the revenue.

Wellworthy is already profitable and generating a ton of revenue and that's a product in a company that we own.

So it's all within this ecosystem.

And I mean, we are going to grow media events are a big piece of that.

We've done some, we have a lot more coming.

We think obviously that's a media value there and that's a product.

And we try to do growth before and we had, you know, the, the, one of the top newsletter growth agencies and you spend these dollars, you get these people, but.

As we were looking, they, I'd rather get you know, I know you have front office sports on they've had that playbook millions of subscribers cause they grow so fast and we've tried that, but in the end it's not the right person.

There's no value.

It doesn't really matter.

I'd rather have a hundred thousand people that trust us dearly than I would have a million people.

And we are going to invest in growth, but we know we're willing to pay 35, 40 for a subscriber if it's the right person, because.

In the end, we could monetize them in different ways versus, you know, trying to get that spend to like the agency was like, Oh, well, we only spent a dollar to get this person.

It's well, it's, I don't know

who that is.

And I don't know what value they do.

They generate for

You know what it's, it's kind of like, I always think like it's, it's fighting the last war.

A lot of generals fight the last war.

It's like the old saw.

And, you know, everyone wants to be milk road or something like this where you like explode in like 18 months and then you have an exit and, The reality is the same examples are still being used like years later, right?

Because like media, businesses are like long term.

They take, they take a while.

Growth.

I've never seen media or growth of any kind, whether it's from social media, SEO, these kind of like co-reg rebranded, co-Reg has recommendations or boosts or whatever you wanna call it that ends up being.

Meaningful and lasting depending on your model.

If you're an arbitrage model, absolutely.

But arbitrage you, the window closes on our arbitrage is my understanding of it.

So I don't know.

I mean, you can make a lot of money off of arbitrage.

I think George Soros did, but, I don't, I'm not an expert at ARB, so I just, I choose not to, to necessarily do that, but as you said, you got to sequence it and when you have a model.

Where it's about high value of your audience.

I mean, I approach mine totally differently, but you know, the LTV on my, on the subscriber list, of the rebooting is really high.

Compared to these, these, far larger, at least, you know, I guess if you look at it, just the top line of like number of subscribers, you know, because they've been.

They've been growth hacked at the end of the day.

And, yeah,

even know what our LTV is, honestly, because if you it's a weird thing, but you know one client on consulting that derived from the media is now a, you know, multiple six figure client.

I don't know how to value that client in terms of like LTV and we know what our media division does.

And honestly, it does well, it's, I think we will be at a.

You know close to next year we'll do seven figure on the media side and I think as that scales from the advertising channels and especially the events not even baked in there I believe that the product and the value is there but

so what you're going to do a million dollars next year.

Just in media.

Yeah, that's our goal.

We just started ramping up media.

you know, especially the press release platform is super valuable, still curated, though we say no to a high percentage of press releases because people want to use it to promote things that we don't think are press release value.

So we literally said, can we build a, what would be our own business, you know, system newswire type thing.

It has to be valuable content.

People can post on it and to that it's generated.

And you know, in that way, it's funny that in Joe and I kick ourselves a lot like we should just do this and in much easier way and, and triple the revenue in certain areas.

But

no easy way.

for us, it was long term value.

No, we agree.

And it's funny now where we're at, but.

Early on, we said that, but I think for us, it's, it's a long term value of what we want to create.

And we think it's honestly for our industry and this is going to sound bad, but like it's there at one point in the media side, there were two or three brands that were there for 10, 20, 30 years, depending on which one.

And now there's just copycats of those since they closed.

And.

Between where the market and investment and industry is going and the money in it versus these other players going this way and what they create from a media events value perspective, everybody sees it and knows and talks about it.

And he's openly like, we don't like this.

We don't want to pay for these events.

We don't want to advertise on this media.

We know it's, it's bad.

We see that and we're like, Oh, if we can keep on path and do this the right way, the value and the revenue and the profit is really there, but it's, it's hard to.

To leave money on the table short term as we chase this long term thing in that mind.

we just met, but will you tell me how much revenue the company has?

I will not,

on.

we,

me this, these seven figures thing with, I didn't, without me

Yeah, that's, that's the media side.

and it's, you know, with the newsletters, podcasts and press releases and stuff that we do there, but as an overall business, I mean, we have big ambitions.

If you look at, just look at the, some of the revenue from that's out there from like recruiting firms alone, the, the, the long term potential is absolutely insane.

And then when we look at the flywheel, we talked to some of these other recruiting firms or And we'll probably acquire some, our goal is to now go and leverage the, the whole kind of thing and start acquiring other businesses because I think our flywheel works better.

if you look at some recruiting firms, all they do is just send mass emails and mass messages and LinkedIn messages.

And we're like, the higher, the, the one thing that Joe wrote, my brother, in the copy for our deck for the recruiting.

It was your, your future candidate already reads our newsletter, already attends our events, already listens to our podcasts and already applied to our candidate portal.

So it's it's already done.

And if we could do that in a big way, so, won't say them, but it's super exciting.

And honestly, it's just us finding Like our head of talent, Brian is, is a, is an absolute killer.

And our head of services in consulting Courtney, she's unbelievable.

And all we do is find really talented people.

And we're like, Hey, if we can get you customers easier and build really good trust and make it so your life, your work life balance is better, but we can build a, what is supposedly a better version of what you did previously, would you come work for us?

And, and that's really

our kind of cheat code

So last thing is, is how do you decide the investment level into the media business when it's smaller?

Right?

Cause I think one of the, one of the things I saw at, my last company that I was at was, you know, events were such an overwhelming part of the business and the publishing was, you know, I think if you looked at the publishing as like a business line, it lost money, right?

because the events were, you know, such high margin.

and you know, then we built like a content studio and then it like, you know, but it was still, you know, if you were to look at the business, You'd be like, Oh, don't, don't invest here.

invest in, in the events, the events, invest in these like shoulder businesses, if you will, off of the content, because if you're just looking at it from a pure spreadsheet level, this stuff is not driving the overall business.

And I think it takes a little bit of just feel for the business of being like, no, but that that's creating, that's creating value.

That's being realized in another business in some ways.

for us.

Because the media existed well before any revenue and where it was, we, and because we relied heavily on agencies in terms of the adjacent costs that goes into it, it's just the editorial team.

And we'll happily invest in them because we don't really, we don't spend money on any marketing or growth.

More numbers don't matter to us.

So it's just create the best content and make sure it lives out there.

It's not that expensive.

And we're happy to invest in growth.

We want to find more people.

We want to build it.

But, you know, if there is growth in cost, it will come from a second newsletter or this acquisition, which will then in turn grow more revenue.

So I think we're lucky that because we're not chasing certain metrics and goals from the media side, we don't have to spend money in certain areas.

So it's, it's just not that expensive.

Plus we live in Pittsburgh.

Our team is here in Pittsburgh.

Pittsburgh is a small, affordable city with amazing talent.

And, you know, I think it costs a lot less than obviously operating in a lot of the major cities that people are building companies in.

Yeah.

I assume you're profitable.

Okay.

I was like, it adds up to be a problem.

I had to make sure, you know, and which is great to talk to people, who are running profitable media businesses, because sometimes it's the idea that there's not, you know, they're, they're not out there.

Right.

And I feel like a lot of that is just about.

General and a lot of times it goes into like news and like hard news and that is not the media industry There's different flavors of media companies and this is a a different type of one but I still to me like Media is of such a large space and there are different business models you don't you can be a media company without a media business model, right at the end of the day

Well, that's the whole thing for us.

I think we are in its truest form, a media company, but we're working to focus actually just on the media from the product.

And that's our true product is the media.

Everything else is just value on top of that.

But And I think we still can learn a lot from traditional media companies.

And like you were talking about webinars and other things, like I'm trying to listen to your content, read your content, go to industry media events, like the media operators and others.

So I can kind of get ingrained because we don't come from the world of here's B2B publishing and here's how you do this or here's how you do that.

but I think it's really just weighing the cost benefit of both and saying like, we can make money this way.

Or we can add value.

And I think of it more as I think the media industry always does, doesn't value this much as much.

Like every other company is paying you for your attention.

You have that attention, just respect it and treat it in a different way.

And like try to see the true value in it.

If they're willing to pay you for this or same thing with goes to the events, there has to be a value within it.

Just don't.

And then everybody just race, at least from what we see, especially in our industry, they race to the bottom of like, can I milk as many dollars out of that?

yeah, we're just trying to do it differently and build there.

I guarantee probably next year, depending on growth and acquisitions than what we try to do, maybe we won't be profitable, but we're trying to build this much bigger ship.

It is for the long haul of like, we look at the industry as we know, it's worth trillions of dollars.

How much more value can we build?

And that's where we're going.

It's not like short term profit or short term growth.

Nothing else really matters, but that

cool.

Anthony, thank you so much for doing this.

It's a fascinating model.

Congrats on the success.

thanks.

Really good to chat.

Appreciate it.